Details, November 1991

The Man Who Would Be Prince

Chris Heath

Prince. He never writes, he never phones. After
six days of waiting, of standing in the same room as him, of being
passed in corridors, of being blanked at nightclubs, I am getting touchy
and I am getting paranoid.

I sit in the Paisley Park boardroom.
As usual, I am waiting. In a few minutes, I am told, I can hear
Prince’s new LP, Diamonds and Pearls. But I’ve been told that before and
there’s always been some problem: busy studios, incorrectly sequenced
CDs, missing CD players. So I wait, not expecting anything to happen,
and spend some of Prince’s royalties phoning up friends in London. As I
chat, one of the other phone lines flashes, but I ignore it. A few
seconds later, in strides Gilbert. Gilbert used to be Prince’s
bodyguard; he is now president of Paisley Park Enterprises and Prince’s
closest confidant. I look guilty. I think he is going to tell me off for
using the phone.

He gestures toward the flashing light. He looks surprised by what he is about to say.

“That’s Prince. For you.”

Six
days. Forever breathing the same air but ignoring each other, I out of
etiquette and he out of...well, those are the sort of things I’m here to
find out. I’ve come halfway around the world and we’re going to
talk...on the phone.

“Hello, Chris. This is Prince.”

He
says he just wants “to say hello.” Still, I am talking-to him. It’s the
first time we’ve spoken since Prince seemed to finger me as a disciple
three years ago, after I had given Lovesexy one of its few positive
reviews. (Apparently, he had appreciated my interpreting his nude cover
pose as a spiritual statement.) In Paris, on the opening night of the
Lovesexy tour, Prince and I were introduced. He stood and grasped my
hand for an unusually long period of time and said, quietly, with a
smile, “You understand.” There was no irony; this was some form of
induction. By way of a reply, I simply mumbled, “I hope so.”

Drifting
in and out of Prince’s world over the next few years, visiting Paisley
Park and talking to those around him, I began to see that understanding
is only the first obstacle. The destination that Prince has in mind for
his disciples is belief-unconditional, devotional, and just slightly
kooky. As a journalist, I was never going to qualify. Besides, living so
deep inside Prince’s head didn’t seem a good prescription for anyone’s
mental health.

Like his records, like his stage shows, Prince’s
Paisley Park headquarters is a monument to this system of beliefs. It’s a
strange place, even to visit. Something in the water, as Prince once so
memorably put it, does not compute. It’s not anything physical, not the
two doves in their cage or the purple galaxy painted on the boardroom
ceiling or the obsessive cleanliness. It’s something more intangible,
and you see it in the faces of the people who work there. They’re like
students taking a long, perplexing exam, trying to work out what the
question means before they can start writing. And the question is this:
What does Prince want? “Ask him!” you want to shout. But there are few,
if any, people here who can ask him a straight question or demand a
straight answer. There was a tabloid story once that claimed Prince
fired employees because they weren’t telepathically responsive. It
wasn’t true, but they were onto something. There’s a lot of second
guessing going on-a lot of people who believe but are still muddling
through the messy, day to-day business of understanding.

The
last time I was here was the summer of 1990, just before the release of
the Graffiti Bridge movie and album. Things then had seemed a little
fractured, and those around Prince didn’t always contribute the most
flattering portraits. He was a genius, yes, but one who had exiled
himself from all but his own brand of reality-and, by extension, from
all but his most devout followers. There was, of course, no testimony
from Prince.

Before this year he has answered questions publicly
only four times since 1984’s Purple Rain. Now, it appears, some effort
is being made. Those around Prince, if not Prince himself, clearly feel
that there is some work to be done on his image, some transformation
from what Boy George once called “a midget dipped in oil and rolled in
pubic hair.” Though “Gett Off” is Prince at his most lewd, his staff
play down what they see as his sexual threat. They gloss over his more
spiritual leanings, the core of his finest music, and treat the
mixed-up, muddled-up Graffiti Bridge as an unfortunate incident best
forgotten. Not a failure, mind you. Prince doesn’t have failures. Ingrid
Chavez, his co-star in the film, told me that Prince would never admit
Graffiti Bridge was a failure-he would simply blame the world for not
“getting it.” Nevertheless, it’s clear that Diamonds and Pearls is a
crucial LP for Prince. Lovesexy, a religious record with a naked man on
the cover, did little to consolidate his superstar status. Batman, a
success, was associated more with a hit film and a comic-book hero than
Prince. Graffiti Bridge was a multi-artist soundtrack saddled with a
flop film. Diamonds and Pearls, however, is a Prince LP. Pure and
simple. If it sells poorly there are no excuses. If it sells poorly it
will be because people don’t want to buy a Prince LP. So I wait to hear
Diamonds and Pearls. The proffered deal was that I’d spend a week at
Paisley Park, listen to the record, talk to his band, go into
rehearsals, and, perhaps, if things go well, if the stars are right,
Prince will talk to me. A little. Perhaps. Without it being recorded, of
course.

It doesn’t start well. I arrive on Tuesday night, and
when I call in on Wednesday I’m told I wasn’t expected until Thursday.
Oh. And when Prince was told I was coming, he apparently moaned that I
had “dogged him in Rio,” where I hadn’t enjoyed his show, and that I
obviously wasn’t a fan. Oh. So I wait. Can I go into rehearsals? No, not
just now. Er, Prince isn’t in a very good mood this week. Oh. I pass
the days mooching around and talking to his employees. Though they must
have his consent to speak to me, when they do talk they’re sweet and
loyal, but also quite open. Prince is a workaholic. He expects you to
work Saturdays. Prince always tells you that he works you so hard
because he knows you’ve got it inside of you. The people who have
trouble with him are the people who can’t accept that he’s the boss.
They tell you all this, patiently and with good humor, but it’s
embarrassing. They know why you’re talking to them, and in Prince’s
absence the conversations take on a disconcertingly religious tone.
Because it is obvious who you are both talking about, it isn’t necessary
to mention Prince by name. It is just Him and He. The one whom you
can’t see but who’s the reason for everything you’re both doing. Rosie
Gaines is the keyboard player and singer Prince drafted for 1990’s Nude
tour. This afternoon Prince has been asking her questions on camera for a
documentary he’s making. I ask her whether she asked him any questions.

“Nooo,” she says, grinning. “I wish I could have.”

Like?

“I want to ask him just to come out to my house and meet my husband and have a barbecue, just not be Prince for a day.”

He
has been around her place once, actually. In the driveway, anyhow.
Prince called up one night after midnight. He’d just done some new
music, and it was so funky he had to play it to someone. She was the
closest. So she gave him directions. When he was outside he phoned from
the car and she came down and sat for half an hour in his blue BMW,
listening to new tunes: “The Flow,” “Walk Don’t Walk.” While the music
played they didn’t say anything. It was so funky Rosie didn’t want to
get out of the car. Rosie listens to Prince’s music and knows he has
love in his heart. Also, he made her feel good about her looks; he told
her she was sexy inside. Prince calls Rosie “cousin.” She calls him
“Prince” but says she’d like to call him “baby.”

Tony M. (for
Mosley) is another initiate in the New Power Generation. Tony has
written some of the raps on the new LP. Prince coaches him. Tony tends
to write “straight from the ’hood.” Prince steers him toward a more
“worldly aspect.” But one day Prince asked him to write a “Gil
Scott-Heron thing on black- on-black crime, cops, and the community.” I
ask him why he thinks Prince wanted something like that. “I think black
awareness is really taking an upturn today,” Tony replies, “and he
really wants to be a part of that.” Tony knows a lot of people in his
neighborhood who don’t like Prince, who think he’s just a pop thing.
“They didn’t get Van Gogh, did they?” he asks rhetorically.

THAT
NIGHT I GO TO GLAM SLAM, THE CLUB opened last year by Prince and
Gilbert. Downstairs, where the normal people mingle, Prince’s Purple
Rain bike sits behind a chain fence, and there’s a shop selling
Prince-style designer clothes from cheap T-shirts to customized leather
jackets with fractured Minnesota license plates on the back (a snip at
$1,500). If you go up the back stairs-and you can only if you’re a
member or a special guest-then you can see lots of graffiti on the
stairwell: “Music will guide us and love is inside us,” “It’s almost
1999” (in mirror writing), “New Power Soul,” and “For a good time phone
777-9911” (don’t bother-it’s been disconnected). Upstairs is the
members’ balcony, from which you can lean down and watch the action
below.

Prince likes to watch. He’s famous for it. One night in
Minneapolis, eating dinner, I’m served by a waitress who’s wearing a
Glam Slam badge. “I like the club,” she tells me, “but not the owner.”
She should. Everyone in Minneapolis should. Prince deserves to be a
hometown hero. He has stayed here, built a studio and film complex that
has attracted performers as diverse as R.E.M. and Barry Manilow. He
regularly plays local club concerts and supports local charities. He
loves this town. But he’s not a hero here. At best, he’s ignored.
Minneapolis radio is white FM rock at its most pure. You hear “Gett Off"
only on KMOJ-FM, an urban radio station supported by donations, and
even they are far more likely to be playing D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the
Fresh Prince. At worst-and one fears Prince doesn’t even realize this-a
lot of people here despise him. They think he’s a snooty weirdo,
cruising around in his limousine with his bodyguards. Sitting in clubs
and summoning girls to do his bidding. Creepy. The waitress thinks so:
“I introduced him to my friend and told him she was a big fan. He didn’t
say anything.” So the waitress gave Prince a piece of her mind. “I
said, ’You’re always in clubs and you don’t drink, you don’t dance, you
don’t do anything, you just sit in the corner...’ “

What did he say?

“Nothing. His bodyguard said, ’He likes to people watch.’ I said, ’Why doesn’t he go people watch on a park bench?’ “

IS
THIS THE REAL PRINCE? IT S HARD TO KNOW for sure, not least because
many of those in a position to know-the people from his past-now work
for him. As soon as he became successful enough, Prince began reeling in
his competitors and childhood heroes, giving them jobs, setting them up
in bands. He talks now of Paisley Park being “much more than a studio.”
It is; it has become Prince’s extended family, over which he presides
as benevolent patriarch. When a new member is to be brought in, Prince
insists on issuing the invitation personally. (Seduction, in all its
forms, is one of his favorite acts.) Once in the family, everyone is
looked after. All that’s expected in return is a limitless belief in
Prince.

Creating a model family seems like a natural impulse for someone who never had one.

Though
he has always denied that Purple Rain is autobiographical, the troubled
father-son relationship the movie depicted has a strong grounding in
fact. Prince’s father had been an unrecognized jazz musician whose
relations with his son deteriorated disastrously as Prince came of age.
On at least one occasion, he was thrown out of the house. Pleading to be
allowed back, Prince spent two hours in a phone booth crying. He later
claimed that this was the last time he ever cried.

He has said
that he was able to forgive once he had a record contract and money in
his pocket. A less charitable view would be that he found peace when he
acquired the power to control. Prince’s immediate world-Paisley Park,
his various bands, and side projects-is driven by the controlling power
of his talent and originality. It is the uncontrollable world that
causes problems. Even as he puts himself beyond the media’s reach, he
obsessively monitors everything that’s written about him. And though he
regards his failures as the world’s failure to “get it,” it apparently
doesn’t ease his pain. To Prince, every career setback assumes the
dimensions of a personal betrayal. Most pop stars want the world, and
they want it now. Prince also wants the world, but he has the hardest
time tuning in to it.

ON SUNDAY, I’M SUPPOSED TO HEAR THE LP,
but it doesn’t happen. The next day, when I’m once again installed in
Paisley Park’s boardroom, Prince calls.

I pick up the telephone
and we exchange pleasantries. His voice is huskier, more manly than you
might imagine. He says he just phoned to say hello and to tell me about
his LP. He says he’s sorry that he can’t be there to play it to me but
that he has to go into town. Right about now he starts moving into
good-bye mode. Quietly I begin to panic at what I’ll be taking home:
“Prince speaks! He says ’Hello! How are you?’ “ So I try to engage him,
desperately following any line of conversation from his last answer so
he has no chance to sign off. Surprisingly, it works.

We talk
about his new LP. “All my last records...have been connected to films.
This is just my music... I just wanted to tell you how long we took
making this.”

It seems silly, but the point seems to be that
Prince views Diamonds and Pearls as a collection of songs that showcases
the breadth of his talents as a songwriter, producer, and performer, a
record that would express many perspectives, not a single theme. He
contrasts this with Lovesexy. After recording The Black Album, with its
hard beats and rough language, he shelved it and resolved to make a very
different sort of record, one that would celebrate a particular idea.
It flew out of him. “I did Lovesexy in seven weeks from start to finish,
and most of it was recorded in the order it was on the record,” he
tells me. “There were a couple of funky things I did at the end and put
earlier on, but it’s pretty much how you hear it.” The Lovesexy tour was
part pop spectacle, part evangelical fervor. Prince would beseech the
crowds to love God, over and over. I mention that people thought in his
more recent work he’d backed off from his evangelical position. It’s
something he jumps on.

“People got that wrong,” he insists.
“Batman was all about that same feeling. Graffiti Bridge was probably
more about that feeling than Lovesexy was. Lovesexy was a state of mind
I’ve come to, and I know it is still there.” He gets increasingly
impassioned. “If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t make records anymore. When
you have that...you know who you are, and you know what your name is. I
didn’t know that before. I thought there were places I had to get to. I
thought there were things I had to do. I was a lot more competitive
because of it. Now I realize that’s not what’s important.”

I ask
him whether he minds having records that aren’t very successful. “No,”
he says. “They all serve a purpose. I’ve already made money, all the
money I need. I was never that interested in money anyway.” He launches
into his thoughts on critics. Though his tone is more playful than
resentful, he has a genuine, almost beautifully naive anger toward
them. “I would never criticize someone else who gave me something for my
head,” he says. “I remember what happened to Stevie Wonder when he did
the Secret Life of Plants record. Stevie was our friend and we’d gone
through so many things, and then we turned our back on him. The critics
said it was no good. But we can’t say that if he’s our friend, and if we
do say that, he won’t be our friend anymore, and he doesn’t want to
play music for us...

“It was the same with Joni Mitchell,” he
continues. “They said she was off her rocker and that she’d gone away.
And the more they said that, the more she went away.”

It seems appropriate to mention Graffiti Bridge. He is not the slightest bit defensive.

“Some people got it,” he counters. “Martika saw it six times.”

His
own mention of Martika leads him into a rapturous appreciation of the
young Cuban pop singer. She is clearly the type of person he wishes all
his audience, all the world, might be. “She is,” he says, “like a flower
unfolding.”

“That’s nice,” says Martika when I speak to her a
few days later. “I feel the same way about him. Though he’s sort of
unfolded already, I guess.” Martika had been thinking about calling
Prince for months. When she saw Graffiti Bridge (she says it’s true, she
has seen it six times) she noticed that a lot of the words were about
the same things she had been jotting in her notebooks. So last December
she flew out to Minneapolis to be with Prince. They sat down and she
showed him her notebooks. He was impressed. She visited several times,
taking four tracks they worked on together away to New York to finish on
her own. She flew back to play him the whole LP and the video for their
hit collaboration, “Love. . .Thy Will Be Done.” When he watched the
video, he was moved.

Martika asks me about my time in
Minneapolis, and I hint at some strangeness. Sometimes, I say, you have
to think: he’s a person, and I’m a person...and he’s rude.

“I
know what you’re saying. He’s difficult to understand like that. But I
don’t think he means to be.” Her position is clear. If he was rude, so
what? You can excuse all that, you must excuse all that, because what it
allows to exist-his music-is ultimately much more important.

Prince
enjoys explaining why he makes music. His first explanation is flip: “I
like music to play in my car, and when I need something new to play I
record something. Instead of buying a tape, I make music.” And at the
moment in his car?

“Diamonds and Pearls, of course.” He usually
cues up “Push,” a frantic band-rap business, then goes from there.
Unless it’s sunny, in which case he plays “Strollin’.”

There’s nothing else he could play.

“I
don’t listen to any of my old music, you know,” he announces with
strange pride, as though it would be some awful thing to do.

And as far as other people’s music?

“You
know when you buy someone’s record and there’s always an element
missing? The voice is wrong or the drums are lame or something? On mine
there’s nothing missing.”

He talks some more about his new
projects. I mention the possible video with Kate Bush. Frequent
transatlantic phone conversations with the floaty Ms. Bush have been
openly alluded to during my tenure at Paisley Park, but Prince denies
any knowledge. Strange. I mention Spike Lee’s video and he is a little
more open. “It’s scheduled, hopefully,” he says. I ask whether they
share a common thread. Prince draws his breath playfully, as though I’m
asking naughty questions.

“I
don’t think so,” says Prince with a chuckle, meaning he does. I ask him
whether he feels the public’s perception of him is accurate. “There’s
not much I want them to know about me,” he says, “other than the music.”

I’m not controlling this conversation, just clinging onto it by
my fingertips. He mentions his work with other artists and says he
writes songs for them “because they ask me.” He names Paula Abdul, Louie
Louie, and Carmen, whom, rather disingenuously (as though I wouldn’t
have noticed her walking around the office or seen her photo on the
hallway wall- the latest female protege on the scene), he describes as
“this new girl out of Cincinnati.” He raves about the New Power
Generation, genuinely thrilled. “Rosie,” he says, “is like a tornado.
There’s never enough hours in the day for her voice. There’s never
enough tape for her voice.. .and my dancers, they’ve waited seven years
for this...”

Eventually, after several more desperate pieces of
stalling from me, he really is going. He signs off by breaking out of
his conversational tone and heading into declamatory soul-star
theatrics. “Don’t come to the concert, y’all,” he shouts down the phone,
laughing. “Don’t come to the concert! I’ve got a band of assassins...”

I
FINALLY GET TO HEAR THE LP. GILBERT LEADS me into Studio A and gives me
a copy of the Lyrics to borrow during the listening, but tells me I
mustn’t write any down. Prince and the New Power Generation have been in
here working on some new songs. One seems to be called “Standing at the
Altar.” On the soundboard Prince has four channels for himself: two for
his vocals, one for “guitar,” and another for “guitar/dirty.”

The
record sounds fantastically good, and after spouting quite genuine
overenthusiasm, I go out to lunch. I’m expecting to be here a few more
days. But on my way out Gilbert says good-bye in what seems a very
conclusive manner. I put it down to Paisley Park paranoia, but when I
phone later I discover I was right, I’m to leave. Later I find out that
Prince has been asking how much longer I’m going to be in town. I head
home. I don’t know if I found anything. I don’t know if I fitted into
some little game of Prince’s, or whether I’ve caused upset in it. He’s
made a record that the world will like, and that’s a good thing. But can
a record alone redraw Prince’s personality, make him more human? His
music, sleeves, videos- even his films-are littered with clever, sweet,
sharp messages, but most of the world just picks up a picture of an
awkward, pervy, self-indulgent geek. The man I talked to on the phone
was smart, polite, charismatic, and playful, but it’s another man-the
people watcher, the one who doesn’t say hello, the narcissist who’s so
into himself all he needs is mirrors and foot servants-that so many
people imagine being the real Prince. There’s one bit of our
conversation that keeps playing over in my head. Written down, now, it
looks a bit silly and precious and all those things that people who
don’t like Prince don’t like about him. But at the time it was moving.
He was telling me, in a different, more intense way than the first time,
why he makes music.

“I make music because if I don’t, I’d die. I
record because it’s in my blood. I hear sounds all the time. It’s
almost a curse: to know you can always make something new.”

Have you always been like that? I ask him.

“No. When I was younger I had...other interests...but you know how the very first song I learned to play was ’Batman’...?”

He leaves the sentence open. Yes, I say, and I fill in the inference. You don’t think that’s an accident, do you?

“There
are no accidents,” he says. “And if there are, it’s up to us to look at
them as something else. And...” At this point he pauses, and even
though we’re talking over the phone I can see him do one of those long
fawn-eyed stares that make you believe every curious syllable he speaks.
“And that bravery is what creates new flowers.”

Whenever I tell
anyone about it, they say it sounds weird. It sounds like he should
grow up. But it sounds like the real Prince. It makes perfect sense to
me.